The future of drugs is here, and it’s dangerously unequal.
Over the last decade, the status quo around drugs has collapsed. Drugs once sold as safe cures have been revealed as ineffective or dangerous, while substances criminalised for generations are being reborn as breakthrough mental health treatments, wellness supplements, Silicon Valley productivity tools and billion-dollar investment opportunities. How did this reversal happen – and who stands to benefit?
In The Next Fix, award-winning author and academic Kojo Koram travels from Scotland to Colombia, Ghana to the United States, to uncover the forces reshaping the global drug landscape. Moving between glossy corporate cannabis expos to grassroots activist campaigns and the question of reparations, he traces the growing tension between movements fighting for justice after decades of prohibition and the finance-world race to profit from a newly legal frontier. Will drug reform finally undo the racial violence, environmental destruction and public health failures of the War on Drugs? Or will it simply open a new chapter in global capitalism, creating a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies?
Urgent, moving and deeply reported, The Next Fix asks whether the War on Drugs is really over – or merely changing its chemical formula.
Over the last decade, the status quo around drugs has collapsed. Drugs once sold as safe cures have been revealed as ineffective or dangerous, while substances criminalised for generations are being reborn as breakthrough mental health treatments, wellness supplements, Silicon Valley productivity tools and billion-dollar investment opportunities. How did this reversal happen – and who stands to benefit?
In The Next Fix, award-winning author and academic Kojo Koram travels from Scotland to Colombia, Ghana to the United States, to uncover the forces reshaping the global drug landscape. Moving between glossy corporate cannabis expos to grassroots activist campaigns and the question of reparations, he traces the growing tension between movements fighting for justice after decades of prohibition and the finance-world race to profit from a newly legal frontier. Will drug reform finally undo the racial violence, environmental destruction and public health failures of the War on Drugs? Or will it simply open a new chapter in global capitalism, creating a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies?
Urgent, moving and deeply reported, The Next Fix asks whether the War on Drugs is really over – or merely changing its chemical formula.
Reviews
A lucid and compelling guide to the new territory in which yesterday's banned substances are today's wellness aids or pharmaceutical miracles . . . The Next Fix argues persuasively that we stand at a crucial inflection point where we have a chance to replace the monopolies and exploitation of the drug trade with regulatory systems that promote local supply chains, compassionate healthcare and global justice
A beautifully written yet rigorous exploration of one of the thorniest issues of our time
Koram tells the stories of those whose lives have been destroyed by the drug war and the heroic efforts to replace it with a system of care and economic transformation. It is both a prescription for a better future and a cautionary tale of the power of capital to up end that vision
Urgent and compelling, The Next Fix forces us to confront the inconvenient truth that the failed War on Drugs is on course to be replaced not by an approach based on compassion and justice, but by the same corporate monopolies and exploitation that have already caused such devastation and inequality. In this deeply necessary book, Kojo Koram offers a clear-eyed, evidence-based guide to the complex and often contradictory world of drugs and drug reform - this is essential reading if we're to have any hope of designing a world that operates on a different logic
Kojo Koram is an unrivaled translator of legal complexity into vivid prose, and The Next Fix is no exception. This book provides a bracing look at one of the deadliest interactions: what happens when you mix drugs, prohibition, and the forces of global capitalism
Deeply researched, elegantly narrated and with a careful focus on human consequences, this eye-opening book brings sharp, sensitive and urgent analysis to a much misunderstood subject
What I love most about Kojo's writing - and there is a lot to love - is how he moves so seamlessly between the complexities and injustices of the global political economy and its legal infrastructure, and everyday experiences of the real world. The Next Fix is an eye-opening and often shocking tale of all that's wrong with how we govern drugs, who is deemed illicit, and what harms those choices wreak on the lives of ordinary people around the world. It also shows us that things don't have to be this way. A must-read for anyone who's ever questioned the war on drugs and their new, legal markets
A compelling and deeply researched exploration of the "brave new world" of drugs . . . Beautifully written, ambitious, and empirically rich, The Next Fix is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the changing dynamics of drug regulation and their human costs, and it makes a powerful, persuasive case for full decriminalisation-for dismantling the punitive machinery that has defined global drug policy for over a century
Kojo is a fantastic scholar, here he continues to show how many common assumptions about drug use and law enforcement simply cannot be understood but through the lenses of class, race and empire. It is only once we account for such things that we can make sense of what otherwise might seem like completely contradictory, even illogical, policies, ideas and applications. Kojo's case is clear and to my mind irrefutable